Disclosure
by Kate Christie
Summary: Post-Ep for "Dial M for Mayor." He just can't keep his secret any longer.
1. Chapter 1

Disclosure

**A/N: Post-ep for "Dial M for Mayor." What a chess game. Holy crud. Had to write to purge the profusion of ideas swirling. Not my characters, just my mind games.**

Her phone vibrated on her nightstand. The green glow of her alarm clock read "3:03." There was only one person it could be.

"What's up, Castle?"

"I, uh, I wanted to hear your voice?"

It sounded utterly like a question, so she answered it in kind.

"Why, Rick? What's going on?"

"I… I needed to hear your voice."

"OK. Dare I ask why?"

"Kate, it might help if you came to your door."

"Oh. What? Ok…" She rose in her flannel pants and long-sleeved t-shirt and kept the phone at her ear, listening to his breathing, slow and steady.

She turned her deadbolt, unlatched the chain, and unlocked the door handle.

As she cracked the door, he pulled the phone from his ear, hit the button to end their call, and tucked the cell in his coat pocket.

"Hey."

"Hey, Castle, what are you doing here?"

"So, I guess I didn't just need to hear your voice."

She opened the door and he entered, crossing in front of her and stopping just inside the door. He seemed unsure of himself. He didn't move to unbutton his coat, as though he thought maybe he was about to be booted back out into the night.

"Here, take that off. You have snow all over you."

He unbuttoned his wool overcoat and handed it to her with his scarf. He'd taken his gloves off outside, to use his iphone to call her. She took the coat and brushed off the few remaining white flakes before hanging it on the coat rack behind her door.

"Come in."

"Kate, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to barge in at 3am."

A song lyric ran through her head, dating her horribly. She'd had too many 3am moments alone to begrudge this one with him.

"It's fine. I wasn't really asleep. Still a little buzzed thinking about the case today."

"I need to tell you something."

"OK."

"Can we, I don't know, sit down maybe?"

"Sorry, yes, sure. Do you want something to drink? A glass of wine? Water? Tea?"

"No, I'm fine."

She moved into her living room, sat on one end of her couch. He settled on the end opposite her.

"I met with someone. It wasn't the first time, actually. I had met him earlier in this case."

"Who? I mean, why? Outside of our case?"

"Yes, Kate. Outside of our case. Let me start from the beginning." She was confused. She figured he came to hash out some point about his connection with the mayor.

"After May, after you were shot, I got a call. A man told me he was a friend of Montgomery's. That Roy had sent him some papers. Evidence. Things he had used to protect his family. That family included you."

What the hell? Where was this coming from? She was tired. Exhausted. She wasn't sure she was fully understanding.

"How is this connected with our case?"

"I have no idea, Kate. All I know is, around the time you came back, when you started back at the twelfth, I got a call. This man said he had evidence that Montgomery had sent to him just before he died. Evidence that he was going to use to keep you safe, as long as I kept you out of your mother's murder investigation. He told me that if I could keep you away, he could keep them from killing you. I didn't know what to do. Over the summer, the boys and I hadn't found anything. We'd followed leads to dead ends. We'd run ourselves ragged and then been told by Gates to leave it alone. And frankly, you were better, and that's all I really cared about."

"Castle, are you saying you had information about my mom's case, my case, and you kept it from me?"

"You can be furious at me. You can tell me you hate me and never want to speak to me again. But yes, I heard from this man, and I went to you and told you to back off. I used every bit of influence I had with you to get you to back away. All because I wanted you alive. I couldn't imagine a world I wanted to live in without you in it. And that thought had special meaning, because for about 3 hours last summer, I was faced with the reality.

"Your heart had stopped. Lanie saw it happen and jumped on your stretcher and started pumping it for you. She wouldn't stop until they forced her to at the hospital. As far as we knew, when we stood in that hallway with your blood on our hands, you were gone, and you weren't coming back. Those were the darkest 3 hours of my life. Ask her some time. I bet she'd say the same."

She'd been listening, but she'd leaned back into the corner of her couch; her gaze had drifted up to the corner of her ceiling, where a shadow and a cobweb entangled and battled for the light from the window nearby. She was shocked. She felt betrayed. She hated him, hated this. She felt like she had no control. She felt like no one in her life had ever cared so much for her without getting anything in return. And at the root of all this swirling thought and emotion, one thing remained. She loved him. So much. God, what could she do? She changed the subject.

"What does last summer have to do with this case?" She still wouldn't engage his eyes.

"I was contacted a couple of days ago. I was told to get you out of this. That if you went too far, it would be the end of you. I called him back to ask him what he meant. He couldn't give me answers. After we figured everything out, he met with me again. Tonight. Just now." He had his elbow propped on the back of her couch, and he leaned his forehead into his hand.

"He said I was more useful to them in the precinct than I would be if I were kicked out for my association with a dirty mayor. The mayor doesn't know about it."

He looked up from under his hand and tried to meet her eyes.

"I know I'm not objective, but this I do know, your mother's murder, your sniper, they don't have anything to do with the mayor. He's as much a pawn in this as I am. But I can't be a pawn in this chess match for your life any longer without telling you what I know. Kate, I made you stop investigating, but I kept going. I haven't found out much, but I didn't quit. The boys don't know. No one knows but my mother and Alexis. I couldn't just let it go, even though I had to make you stop."

Her heart constricted. She couldn't breathe. The thing she had fought so hard to put behind her for all these months was alive and well in him. She hadn't rid herself of it, because at the end of the day, she was a part of him. Lately, a bigger part than she wanted to admit.

"Why are you telling me this, Castle?" she finally looked him in the eye. He looked so afraid. She didn't want to think about what she had done or said or been in the past that would give him reason to be so afraid of her response.

"I can't lie to you anymore. It's not something I can justify." He reached for her hands, took them in his, held them tightly. "Not when I love you so much that I can't see any way forward without you."

Her eyes had been stinging, tears welling since he'd mentioned the day she almost died. She'd blinked them back successfully until now. One escaped and made its way down her cheek to catch at the corner of her mouth. When she spoke, she didn't recognize her voice. It was deep, dark, almost a whisper.

"Castle, can you give me a reason why I shouldn't scream at you, kick you out, tell you to quit sticking your nose into my business, where it doesn't belong?" He hadn't let go of her hands, despite her meager effort to disengage from his grip.

"Because it does belong. Because your business has been my business for a long time now. And you know it, Katherine Beckett. You're just too scared to admit it. I was, too. But I'm not now. And you shouldn't be, either. If we are going to do this, we will do this together. And if we don't, then we'll thumb our noses at these people and their power, and we'll be happy. And I don't care which way you choose, as long as you're alive and I'm with you."

She took in a shaky breath.

"Rick." It sounded more like a plea or maybe a sob than a question.

But that syllable was apparently all he needed. He let go of her hands and shifted forward to take her into his arms. He pulled her against his chest and nuzzled her lips against her ear.

"I love you, Kate. And whether you heard me last summer or not, I don't care. I just want you to hear me now." She inhaled and took in his scent, then exhaled and whispered against his neck.

"I heard you. I hear you. Rick, I love you, too. I just –"

He didn't give her the chance to complete her thought. He pulled back just far enough to see her eyes and apparently satisfied with what he found, he kissed her. She might never have cried into a kiss before, she wasn't sure. But he didn't seem to mind her tears. And then he was pulling her head to his chest, gripping her with strong arms, bands of steel, imprinting his grip on her soft flesh. And she nuzzled his neck and thought that no wall would stand a chance against this onslaught. Absolutely none whatsoever.

**A/N: So I did not intend to write this. Had great deep thoughts about a multi-chapter fic with intricate plot-driven intentions, multiple plotlines in fact, and only occasional fluff and/or smut. And then I saw tonight's episode. Sigh. Perhaps sometime later this week. –K. C.**


	2. Chapter 2

Disclosure

**A/N: Fluff abounds, though not in the form of a kitten, in this case. **

"Castle?"

He heard her soft voice whisper near his ear and felt her hand stroke back and forth across his chest. This was the best dream he'd ever had. Well, maybe not the best. There was that one with the handcuffs the night after the tiger almost ate them, and the one with her climbing on his shoulders wearing only her underwear right after the haunted house, and…

"Rick. Come on. Wake up."

His eyes popped open at her harsher tone. They met hers, which at the moment seemed tired, tempered by frustration, and possibly regret. It was hard to tell in the pitch black living room. He felt the warmth of her body where it made contact with his. She was tucked between his chest and the back of the couch, stretched out half on top of him. Oh, not a dream; decidedly not a dream.

And then he noticed those tormented eyes were rimmed with pink and slightly puffy lids, and it all came back to him. He'd told her. He'd told her everything; about her mysterious protector, about his keeping the case open behind her back, about knowing she was lying about not hearing him last May.

"Up, Rick." She patted the center of his chest. "Off the couch." She untucked herself from him and stood, looking back for him to follow.

What was that he heard, a clunk in the night? Oh yes, the sound of the other shoe dropping.

She was sending him home. Despite the kiss, she was kicking him out.

She'd been crying, for God's sake. He'd completely taken advantage of her with the kiss. How could he have been so stupid? She must have had time to think about it all while he was passed out under her, and she'd come to her senses. He shook himself slightly and started to rise.

"You're right. I should go. I'm… I'm sorry about all this. I shouldn't have come here like this in the middle of the night and – "

"Stop being ridiculous, and come get some sleep. It's only four. If we stay on the couch we won't be able to stand up straight in three hours."

She turned and took off toward her bedroom while he stood dumbstruck, mouth slightly agape, blinking very deliberately after her.

She turned when she reached the bedroom door and gave him her best expectant Beckett eyebrow raise.

"You coming, Castle?"

He tilted his head slightly toward her, closed his mouth, and started walking.

"Yes. Yes, I am."

"There's a new toothbrush in the top drawer by the sink." Her voice was all business. She was rooting around in the bottom drawer of her dresser when he entered her room.

Sweet baby kittens, he was in Kate Beckett's barely-lit bedroom. She had red sheets. Maybe this was, in fact, a dream after all. But if not, just the image of those sheets would fuel fantasies that could last him for years.

As he tore his eyes from her bed he saw she was staring at him from the other side with just a tiny upturn to the corner of her mouth.

"Here, you can wear these."

She tossed him a pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt that looked oddly… familiar… somehow.

"Hey, are these - ?"

"Yours, yes. They were the ones I wore when I stayed at the loft. They ended up with my pajamas by mistake when I left. Now go change so we can get some sleep."

When he reappeared moments later after repeating three hundred and forty-three, now -four, times that he would be sleeping with Beckett, in her bed, between her burgundy sheets, he found her under the covers on her back with her eyes closed.

"These smell like you." He pulled the neck of his t-shirt up over his nose and took a sniff.

"Hmm? You mean like my fabric softener? Yeah, I do laundry occasionally."

"No, I mean like you: sort of citrusy and spicy and Becketty."

"I may have occasionally slept in them since they migrated here."

With that he gave up all pretense of playing this cool and grinned. He knew he must look like an idiot, standing by her bed with one hand on the covers, beaming about the fact that she'd worn his clothes to bed, but he didn't care. She opened her eyes, pursed her lips and gave him half an eye roll.

"You could gloat slightly less about this, especially if you want to actually get to sleep in my bed."

He schooled his features back to mild glee and crawled under the covers. She was decidedly lying on one side of the bed, so he stuck to the other and reached over to turn out the light. Settling on his back, he tried to slow his breathing. It wasn't likely he would be resting much with all the thoughts running amok through his brain, but at least he could give that appearance and maybe she could sleep some.

"Rick?"

"Yeah."

"We're going to talk about this… whatever this is. Just not tonight, OK?"

"Promise?"

"I do."

He felt her shifting on the mattress and all of a sudden he felt her breath puff on his shoulder. Her hand found the center of his chest and her fingers curled slightly into the soft fabric over his heart. He felt her knee bump against the outside of his thigh as she curled further onto her side. He laid his own hand over hers and gripped it lightly with his fingertips.

"Goodnight Rick."

"I can't use my line, Kate."

"Hmm?"

"It's already tomorrow."

"Uh, well, yeah. That's true."

"How about, 'sweet dreams?' Too cliché? Maybe 'sleep tight?' Seems a little impersonal."

"Castle, inside voice. Talking tomorrow, sleeping now."

"Right. Wait, I've got it." He turned his head to look at her and realized how close she was.

"Oh good lord. If I had known you talk this much in bed I'd have left you on the couch."

"I love you, Kate."

Her fingers tightened around his, and she pressed her cheek against his shoulder. She spoke against his shirt, her shirt, their shirt.

"I think that will do just fine."

**A/N: Mas? No mas? I leave it up to you, dear reader. The plot bunnies are circling.**


	3. Chapter 3

**Disclosure 3**

**A/N: So much fluff I think I might even be making myself a little ill. But they have a real conversation at the end.**

She was floating somewhere warm and happy between sleep and wakefulness. Something wasn't right; she hadn't felt floaty-warm and snuggly in her bed since before the nightmares. A long time before the nightmares, actually, since the last source of snuggling she might have had was decidedly not a snuggler and tended to get paged away if she ever fell asleep before he left. Hold on, since when was _she_ a snuggler, anyway?

She felt the warm chest rising and falling regularly under her cheek. With her nose buried against him, she couldn't help but inhale the scent of his fading cologne, mixed with her fabric softener and a dash of male. Yup, this was definitely Rick in her bed. Whoa, hold on there. She did not remember falling asleep with any body parts buried against Rick's chest. She opened one eye to better assess and thought back to falling asleep _next to_ Rick, not _on top of_ Rick.

Well crap, Sleeping-Kate had apparently decided snuggling was more comfortable and acted on it without consulting her. Sleeping-Kate had also apparently flung her arm around his ribcage and securely tucked her fingers under his opposite side, which meant if she tried for a subtle extraction now, she'd probably wake him up. And then there was her thigh, which she wasn't quite sure where to place at the moment, since she couldn't see it under the comforter, but "tangled" might be the best descriptor of its association with Rick's lower limbs. Well crap.

Sleeping-Rick was no slacker in the snuggling department either, apparently, since she noticed he'd managed to wrap one arm around behind her and place his long fingers dangerously close to the underside of her breast. Around the time she started her mental countdown to just bolt quickly and run to the bathroom before he really knew what was going on, she felt him take a breath deeper than all the prior ones. He tightened his grip around her and unconsciously (she presumed, though maybe not) made partial contact with the aforementioned sensitive body part. Harsher curse words replaced the countdown in her head.

A glance at the clock showed her it was seven. On a normal Saturday, she would have been up an hour ago, back from her run, and drinking coffee. Oh, she smelled the coffee. Bless the infallible timer on her coffee maker. But since she'd had a minor, drama-filled interruption in her night's sleep, she'd apparently taken advantage of her Castle body pillow for the extra hour to catch up. So many inappropriate comments she could insert here.

"Mmm. Kate. Hey. I smell coffee."

He was nothing if not predictable.

"Good morning to you, too, Rick…" she turned her head up toward him with a slightly sarcastic smirk and took in his hazy, slowly-blinking eyes and ruffled hair. She needed to escape before he realized…

"I like this cuddly side of you. All warm and comfy." He lifted his free hand to cover his mouth as a yawn escaped. He idly stroked his other hand down her ribcage and back up again and her eyes went wide. She watched it dawn on him where his hand actually was with a wave of chagrin.

"Oh, sorry." But he didn't actually move his hand away.

"Uh, yeah." He shook his head and blinked and slid his palm to a more neutral position on her back.

New-found honesty and declarations of love and sleeping in the same bed aside, they hadn't quite covered "copping a feel in pajamas" previously. She just thought it might be smart to take things a little slower with the physical side, like for example more than four hours after admitting their feelings.

But then again, four years was a lot of foreplay. God, Awake-Kate was starting to sound like Sleeping-Kate in her head. Time to get up.

She pulled her limbs back to herself and propped up on one arm next to him.

"Want some of that coffee? I have cereal, but it doesn't contain any marshmallows, so you might not like it."

He seemed to be taking this waking up in her bed wrapped in her arms thing remarkably well. Actually, if she thought about it, so did she. Huh. Weird.

"I will have you know that I eat non-marshmallow cereal, too. Cocoa Puffs, for example. I even tried Alexis' Honey Bunches of Something-Good-For-You once, and it wasn't terrible."

"That's some range, Rick." She couldn't stop the "Ricks" from coming out of her mouth! Where the hell was her filter? Oh, wait, she didn't usually have to apply the Castle filter with him next to her _in her bed_, prior to a run and a shower and caffeine. That might be it.

Then again, maybe it was the lingering rush of hormones from their early morning declarations of love. She'd actually said it out loud. That had just popped out, too. The filter caught it every other time she had been thinking it so loudly at him that she figured he must have heard it directly from her brain, but not last night. This morning. Whatever. Times, they are a-changing.

She must have drifted off into her thoughts, because he was waving at her with a goofy grin on his face.

"Penny for your thoughts?"

"Just trying to figure out what the hell to do with…" she pointed back and forth between them, "…this, us, together in my bed."

"Wow. I knew that's what you were thinking, but I'd never have guessed you'd actually admit it." He had a funny, bemused little grin on his face, cuing her in to the fact that he wasn't making fun of her honesty.

"But we need nourishment before we can have this discussion. And caffeine. And maybe a shower. Separately is fine, but I'd be open to having the discussion face-to-face in the shower if you prefer."

That garnered a full eye roll.

As they finished their respective bowls of Cheerios with skim milk and bananas (hey, at least she'd had bananas), he took a long swig of his coffee and shifted his focus to look her square in the eye.

"Listen, Kate. I just want you to know one thing from my perspective. I needed to tell you what I'd been keeping from you. I needed to tell you that I had your secret figured out. And I needed to hear how you felt about me. All three of those things were accomplished by 3:30AM. I've said my peace, and you didn't throw me out. I assume if you were so angry that you couldn't forgive my intrusion into your mother's case, I wouldn't have spent the morning in your bed. If not a single intimate, happy, together thing happens between us other than what happened last night, I can live with that, at least until you're ready for more."

He just looked sincere. There was no other word for it. He had no media face on. He had no publicity tone to his voice. He didn't sound imminently like he was attempting to convince her of something. He just sounded like Rick Castle being honest. The same person she saw when he was with his daughter. The same one she saw in a freezer, in front of a bomb (or two), in a cemetery. This was the real Rick. She couldn't blame any of it on an image or a publicity hound. So she had to take him at his word.

"I can't tell you that I'm pleased about being manipulated. If there is one thing I can't tolerate in my life both as a professional police officer and as a human being, it's being led somewhere without full knowledge about why," she paused, took a breath, and told him the truth.

"But I can understand why you did it. Roy did the same thing to me, and I forgave him. And I wasn't in love with Roy."

**A/N: Sooo… I keep writing on this one and ignoring the sketching out of my dark and brooding multi-chapter fic with angst (and of course Caskett goodness at some point). I feel the post-ep story has to end before the next ep airs. Ergo, this may be done now. We have dogs to deal with come Monday.**


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